Summer is ending - Solo Backpacking in the Eastern Sierra - Twenty Lakes Basin - Steelhead Lake

I can feel it in the air, the chill slowly seeping into more and more of the sunny days. It's tolling the end of summer. How can it be that it's September already? Time just seemed to have sped by when I wasn't paying attention. Dread and dismay blow in like icy winds. Dismay that I haven't made more of these past few months. Dread for the coming cold and long nights. Everyone who knows me well knows my love of sun and summer, so a sense of urgency and desperation has overtaken me for one more escape before the fall. Here I am in the mountains again, returned to the eastern Sierra, just east of Yosemite in the Twenty Lakes Basin. The trail starts at Saddlebag Lake, where you can take a water taxi from one end to another, which will shave off approximately three miles round trip. But I want to walk the whole thing and relish the solitude of this part of the hike, which skirts Saddlebag. There is a word I just learned, hyperphagia, which describes the period when a bear is in a constant state of relentless hunger and consumption just before winter hibernation. I think I'm in my own hyperphagia at summer's end, when I want to gorge on trees and lakes and sunshine. Are there twenty lakes in this area? I don't know, but I don't go too long without stumbling into a body of water, each one remarkable in its own way. This is a fitting place for a feast. I think it's this way. Okay, oh, whoa. All right, I think it's this way. Yeah, this looks like a trail, I think. Are you kidding me? Yeah. Okay. Oh, here's a trail or something. Lord. Oh, that feels so good. Oh, I'm so cold. So windy. I hope it doesn't rain tonight. Oh, nice and hot. Fine dining in the bushes. Lemon ginger tea. Oh, that feels good. Oh, yeah. S'mores bar. That's right. Well, it's five o'clock. I've already eaten dinner. I guess I'll read. This is a good book. Probably finish it tonight. Okay. How am I going to keep warm? So I have the long sleeve shirt I'm wearing today, a tank top underneath that, a flannel and then another long sleeve shirt, my leggings and then another pair of pants, joggers. So two pairs of pants. And then I'm going to wear three pairs of socks. First layer, second layer wool, and then third layer socks. So two pairs of socks. These are warm. I have gloves, my knit hat and my puffy. And if that's not enough, I'm gonna boil a bunch of water and have hot water bags or hot water bottles, three hot water bottles tonight. Okay, wish me luck. The wind blows so fiercely at night that it pulls up one of my tent stakes. When morning comes and I see the walls of my tent become lighter and lighter, I scramble out of my sleeping bag and fumble with the door zippers in haste, afraid that I would miss this. I greet the rising sun as though it were a beloved deity returning to her worshiper. The premise of the novel I was reading last night is that in the afterlife, you take on the form of the truest version of yourself when you are alive. And then you board a train that takes you to different significant points in your life that shaped you before reaching eternity. My preferred eternity, I think, would look something very much like this place. A beautiful blue lake with a majestic mountain peak genning just beyond. Maybe with the addition of rowa trees and warmer temperature. But me, the me who exists here is exactly who I would like to be for all eternity. Happy, curious, with a book in hand, and a view that takes my breath away.